Course: Othello by William Shakespeare

Date / Time

  • September 20, 2017
    6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
  • September 27, 2017
    7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

This course includes 1 session and 1 field trip to Lantern Theatre’s production of Red Velvet, about a 19th-century African American actor and his career portraying Othello onstage. Details to come.

“A Certain Woman,” or A Renaissance Poetry Standoff

Your husband flees to another country after Mary Tudor becomes Queen of England. When he goes, he tells another man to “look after” you. Thirty years later, you have a Renaissance poetry stand-off with the man in Queen Elizabeth I’s court and you win. The nature of the 16th century court can get very confusing …

When Mary Met Percy: A Love Story

What’s a good love story without a little bit of drama? Sure, there’s something to be said of happy couples riding off into the sunset, hand in hand, but what people really want are stories full of pain, struggle, heartbreak, infidelity, poverty, loss, and just enough love left over to keep things interesting. While most …

Hands-On Tour: Charles Dickens

Date / Time

  • August 18, 2017
    3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Even if you’ve never read a line of Charles Dickens’s work, you know some of his creations. In this tour we’ll look at the original portrayals of Oliver Twist, Scrooge, and other memorable characters. Through manuscripts, letters, and other documents we’ll follow their creator’s progress from ambitious unknown to international celebrity.

Hands-On Tour: Women Poets

Date / Time

  • August 11, 2017
    3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Covering female poets from the 16th century to the 20th century, this new Hands-On Tour highlights remarkable female poets in the Rosenbach collection, including Phillis Wheatley, Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson. Through manuscripts, commonplace books, and first editions of their writing, we will discuss their extraordinary ways of creating identities, adaptation to adversity, and breaking conventions through poetry.

Hands-On Tour: Women Poets

Date / Time

  • August 4, 2017
    3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Covering female poets from the 16th century to the 20th century, this new Hands-On Tour highlights remarkable female poets in the Rosenbach collection, including Phillis Wheatley, Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson. Through manuscripts, commonplace books, and first editions of their writing, we will discuss their extraordinary ways of creating identities, adaptation to adversity, and breaking conventions through poetry.

Hands-On Tour: Women Poets

Date / Time

  • August 6, 2017
    3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Covering female poets from the 16th century to the 20th century, this new Hands-On Tour highlights remarkable female poets in the Rosenbach collection, including Phillis Wheatley, Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson. Through manuscripts, commonplace books, and first editions of their writing, we will discuss their extraordinary ways of creating identities, adaptation to adversity, and breaking conventions through poetry.

Making a Verbal Monster:  Cyclops in Virgil’s Aeneid 3 and Joyce’s Ulysses

For this year’s Bloomsday and the rest of this summer, the Rosenbach’s partner desk display in the historic library is filled with objects that show classic literary influences on James Joyce’s Ulysses.  Starting with his introduction (at age 10) to Homer’s Odyssey through Charles Lamb’s school edition, we see that the characters and language of …

Hands-On Tour: Shaping Shakespeare

Date / Time

  • July 21, 2017
    3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

When is Shakespeare not Shakespeare? And what is a folio, anyway? After seeing some of Shakespeare’s earliest printings and books that inspired his plots, we’ll explore how his work has fared at the hands of actors, editors, and forgers.

Hands-On Tour: Lewis Carroll

Date / Time

  • July 14, 2017
    3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Mathematician and cleric Charles Lutwidge Dodgson published children’s books under the pen name Lewis Carroll. This tour will explore both the man and the author, drawing on letters from Dodgson to his publishers, original drawings by John Tenniel (the illustrator of the Alice books) photographs of children taken by Carroll, and, of course, copies of his books.